WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Flyover Features: Are Humanities Departments Dying?

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

Emma and Sophia discuss an Atlantic article which discusses a recent decision by the University of Chicago to pause admission to doctoral programs in subjects like the arts, languages, and social sciences.

Welcome back to Flyover Features on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.1.7 FM, a witty radio show where we discuss current events and culture through the lens of an article. I am Sophia Mait and I am here with Emma Vrini. Today, we will be discussing an article published by the Atlantic titled, If the University of Chicago won't defend the humanities, who will? Why it matters that the University of Chicago is pausing admissions to doctoral programs in literature, the arts, and language. by Tyler Austin Harper. Yeah, so any thoughts on this one? I thought this was super... Honestly, I found it a very refreshing article.

I can, you know, explain a little bit more as to why I thought that later, but I was sort of expecting a very liberal defense of the humanities and I was surprised. I'll say that I thought this was a really good article. I thought it was super interesting. I thought it was super engaging. But aside from that,

I think that the writer here takes a very, I want to say, aristocratic approach to his defense of the humanities. And obviously we can get into that a little more. But maybe let's just talk about what is it that's going on at the University of Chicago this admission cycle? Well, the short answer is they've literally paused, as then they've stopped accepting applicants for acceptance into some of their growth. graduate programs, such as in some departments like art history, English language and literature, they've reduced admissions for those. And then they've even freeze it for others, like classics and certain ones in the social sciences, so anthropology and social thought. And the article mentions, you know, this is where philosopher Hannah Arendt even once taught. And I really first heard about this actually not from this article but from other people because I study sociology so the social

sciences and I knew someone who wanted to apply to the committee on social thought which is very renowned and she said well I guess I have to think of something else because they're no longer accepting any applicants and the University of Chicago blames it on funding and the like yeah so that's where the concern is but it is a little bit worrying because the institution is very well-renowned for its programs in those fields. So it's like, well, what does it mean if, like, the best place to study social thought in the country, some would say, is now no longer accepting applicants? And, you know, does this speak of an increased devaluing of the humanities where people just

try to do their own AI posts instead of writing something themselves or actually reading it? So a lot of interesting implications. To my knowledge, you know, Chicago seems to be in a uniquely bad position compared to other institutions. But I'm curious if you have any more thoughts on that, Emma. Yeah, I thought the whole way that this actually came about was super interesting. The article basically talks about how 15 department chairs of the humanities were in a meeting with Deborah Nelson, Chicago's Arts and Humanities. we're in a meeting with Deborah Nelson, Chicago's Arts and Humanities Dean, and 14 out of 15 people were like, okay, if you're going to freeze some of these programs, we're all out. And you might as well just freeze all of our programs. So I think it was accepting philosophy and like music, I want to say music theory, music composition. All these people just went in together and they were like, you either freeze all of us or none of us. So that's sort of how we've come about to the situation we're at right now.

So there's like this very, this, this very unique solidarity among a lot of these people, which, I mean, sort of explains why it's not just a couple of programs getting cut. This is a big deal. Yeah. And it's also interesting because I had seen this paragraph because I think specifically this paragraph of the article went viral before I actually read the whole thing more recently, where it talked about, you know, because this is getting all into the bait of, oh, liberal, versus, you know, we need to go back to the base to Western tradition, whatever, learning. And he talks about these faculty perspectives also stood in stark contrast with the reigning image of elite higher educators in right-wing media outlets that humanities professors are woke activists, whose primary concern is the political indoctrination of the youth.

Most of the Chicago faculty I spoke with saw and defended their disciplines. in terms that were, if anything, conservative, implicit in their impassioned defense was the belief that the role of a humanist is to preserve knowledge, safeguard learning from the market and the tides of popular interest, and ward off. Course appeals to economic utility.

And, you know, I bet I probably have a fair bit of ideological differences with the faculty of institutions in anthropological, sociological fields. But, I mean, I have to admit in that specific issue, the specific argument they're framing, I would very much agree that that is, as the youth say it, a based statement or argument that, you know, I do think there is something wrong about just this obsession with economic utility or, you know, only majoring in finance or just this other devaluing of the humanities. and this is something I've always said

that I do very much disagree with a lot of the so-called right. It's more populist figures and less so the intellectuals ironically and because, you know, thus the intellectuals usually have degrees. You know, I mean, I also am not like you're an idiot if you don't have an degree.

That's dumb too. I don't like people that are like that either. But it's just, I really think there's fundamentally something very valuable and important to being human, to understanding your past and your history and yourself as a person when it comes to studying, say, music or philosophy or sociology.

And you need to be more creative in your thinking about the discipline and how one best to learn it, then just have the response that's something that should be taken or thrown away. And not everyone, but there are some, I would say, attitudes I see within the Trump administration that I am not in agreeance with is this view that, oh, it's very, very true that there is a very strong emphasis or plenty of viewpoints in sociology that, for example, are Marxist, are more liberal, etc. But I just think one should more creatively than try to think or come up with alternative thinkers or ways of seeing or understanding the discipline than simply having the response of wanting to get rid of it entirely. I mean, that's a bit of a different tangent because

it sounds like this was, the article later says the move to scale back humanities is either an acknowledgement of the creator job market for tenure track professorships or protecting it wisely from looming financial political risks. So, you know, there's mixed reasons for why this article's claiming that the humanity is having issues because in some cases it is directly because of the Trump administration. But this does sound like it was more of a problem with the school and its handling of money. I just want to comment on this paragraph because the one that Sophia just read, I find it highly ironic.

And I can't exactly fault the author for writing such a confusing, just contradictory series of sentences. Now, I'll just repeat what Sophia said. Most of the Chicago faculty I spoke with saw and defended their disciplines in terms that were, if anything, conservative, period. Okay, so I think if we just switched out the word conservative with like bourgeois or just like not super refined, that would be a better alternative. Because this is actually at its, at its core, a very aristocratic argument, basically that we should not just pursue disciplines in college or in higher education just because of their economic utility. We should do it because these things are worth knowing and worth studying, you know? And I mean, that was that was like the aristocratic view

for a very long time. Like the whole idea that you had the leisure to study the humanities as opposed to a more practical pursuit, meant that you, you know, were well-born or you had the money to do it or something like that. So looking at this, I think this is one of the more jumbled graphs in the article, because, I mean, it's just the claim that, you know, it's more conservative to, you know, not pursue the humanities, just like doesn't have very much grounding in, you know, historical truth. I don't think he's saying that it's more conservative to not defend the humanities. I think he's saying, if anything, the idea of the humanities having value in and of itself is a more conservative position. I think he's saying that the conservatives, the people who support Trump, for instance, do not exactly.

think that the humanities have value in and of themselves. Okay, I could have misinterpreted the paragraph, but I kind of thought that, oh, they spoke with and saw and defended their disciplines in terms that were, if anything, conservative. Well, that's really funny. So I see your interpretation is maybe that he's saying, ha, ha, these people don't believe in preserving knowledge and safeguarding learning. It's like, well, you know, if you're actually conservative, which is not the case of a lot of people

in certain political places of power that may or may not start with an R. you know, you actually would have that view. I mean, I'm pretty sure Russell Kirk would be, you know, that dude definitely valued the humanities as does our college. Yeah. Yeah, I think, well, this is one of the things I really do sort of resent people who are Trump adjacent. I wouldn't necessarily say Trump at all. But one of the things that I think is just a very wrong view to have is that we need to always be pursuing careers and education that can present some sort of economic utility to us in the future. And I like how this says, actually, at the top of this page, well, actually in the previous graph would be a better way to describe it, but it says, after all, most humanities PhD students at

Chicago do not pay tuition and receive stipends to cover their living costs. And getting paid to learn and read is not the worst fate. like a lot of these people are simply smart enough to have their education bankrolled by somebody else. Like, and you'll see a lot of people who support Trump say, oh, well, you know, why do people go to college for so long? Why do, why don't people just become plumbers or why don't people just start their own, you know, carpentry business? And it's like, I think that's just one of the most absurd, ridiculous, like, arguments ever. It's because people who are smart have intellectual interests, and it might not always be the most economic thing to do. But if they're smart enough, they're going to get the money to cover their college education from scholarships or from stipends.

So that's just somewhere I really diverge from the whole Trump movement. And granted, I do support the middle class. I do support American industries. I do support those things. but we should be very, very cautious not to elevate them too highly. Yeah, well, it's interesting too because it seems like their defense of the humanities is a very aristocratic Matthew Arnold high culture viewpoint to, which would, I think, be understood in some ways as more conservative. But I will say a partial challenge to that is I think plenty of plumbers,

people in whatever, blue-collar jobs are quite smart or even smarter than people that are studying the things that are supposed to know better. But on average, they are not as intelligent. There are outliers, but there is, there is. And I mean, okay. I would challenge that. I will say, I will say that a lot of people who go to college are not the brightest. But if you're going to a college and it has a less than 50% acceptance rate,

the average person there is going to be much more intelligent than the average plumber. Oh, no. I guess technically you're right. Like a college is only going to accept 18% of people know. But I'm thinking of just anyone getting higher education, not necessarily. Yeah, well, that's because higher education has become democratized. And actually, that was one of the next things I wanted to talk about, which is that you look at some of these fields. And I think something that has trended in the past couple of decades, or not even the past couple of decades, I would say even the past 50 to 100 years, is that the average intelligence of the college student has declined a lot.

I mean, I will cite this one study. Here it is. Meta-analysis, on average undergrad students' intelligence is merely average. This is by Bob, and I'm going to butcher this, Bob Attle, Lacey Gibson, and Victoria Biolo. And so I found some interesting statistics in here. So one of them is, if you go and look at this. study, you can look under figures 8 and 9, which basically just shows when you adjust for the Flynn effect. And the Flynn effect is basically a unexplained, but also explained because we know why it happens. But the average IQ has risen, the average IQ score from IQ test has risen over

time. We know now that that's because people have sort of adapted their test aptitude because they have become more familiar with how to take IQ tests. But anyway, the Flynn effect, the Flynn effect adjusted numbers here show that the average undergraduate student's IQ has been on the decline since the 1940s. And another interesting one is a, I'll try to explain this graph. So on the X axis, we have the GRE verbal and on the Y axis, we have the Y axis, we have, the GREC quantitative. And if you don't know, the GRE is like, it's an exam that you have to take to sort of assess your aptitude for graduate school, for post-undergraduate education. And so there's a verbal component, and then there's a quantitative component. And if you look at this, this is in the

same study, figure five, if you want to look at it. STEM majors actually tend to do around as well, on the verbal component as humanity's majors do. But humanity's majors do significantly worse on the quantitative component than STEM majors do. And so something that we have to wrestle with in higher education now is how are we going to get students who are well-rounded and genuinely intelligent? because what we have right now is we're sort of just letting it slide in the humanities, yet we're upholding rigorous standards for STEM. And that's not to say that there aren't exceptions.

I certainly know of people who are in STEM who are just completely brain dead when it comes to the humanities. And that's not good either. But it's especially not good that a lot of these people cannot pass basic high school math classes. And they think that they should go get a PhD. some humanities field. I think that one of the best metrics of intelligence is that you have a well-rounded intelligence and you're not severely slacking in one region. You're listening to Flyover Features on Radio Free Hillsdale

101.7 FM. Okay, so I had not heard about that study previously. I find that interesting, and I'm not going to say I don't believe in the study because obviously it's clear in there, but anecdotally that did not go where I expected it would, because I feel like I definitely know STEM people that are not very knowledgeable at all in the humanities. The humanities not doing well in the math stuff, though totally makes sense, especially because I'll have to be honest, I probably would not do great on numbers because, like, I just don't use anything beyond like basic addition and subtraction of my life now. Like in high school, I actually had to take like a math course every semester, and now I'm just

doing abstract things that don't involve numbers really. But that's odd. I mean, it is unfortunate how specialized things have become too. And I think that is an increasing trend, perhaps, because here at Hillsdale, it's a little unusual how much of a core we have to take and just how many courses. I mean, yes, there's normally required courses at other institutions, but it's way more here and they have honestly I would say kind of high standards like do the English courses I took here were like the hardest I've ever taken um yeah the English the English courses here are extremely hard when you compare them to the core classes that we have to take in the sciences um so it just goes to show that we have really high standards for the humanities here and not as high

standards for the sciences and I I think it's fine if you're not good at every single scientific discipline. Like, if you're kind of, you kind of stink at physics and biology, but you're pretty good at chemistry and you are able to do well in math courses, that's fine. It's fine of every single humanity or every single STEM course that you take here isn't your bread and butter. But you have to show some level of competence because it is important to some degree to understand these disciplines. Yeah. And I also think that a lot of the times when I read something and noticed a weakness in it intellectually as an argument, it's because they aren't well-rounded at another subject. Like, sometimes they'll read some scientific works or

scientists. Like, there was an example that actually someone posted in a Discord server a while back, and they were saying like stuff that was, the person was a mathematician, and they were saying stuff that I, with a very limited but cursory knowledge of like the actual development, not when it came to a computer programming way, but just like, invention historical way of and media theory way of the computer was saying was arguing for evolutionary theory and I want to make this clear I'm not saying I don't believe in evolutionary theory just it was the dumbest way ever I've ever seen it argued on the basis of that computer the invention of the computer was like an aimless procedure and I was like that's like not historically what happened

it was a US military project really called ARPANET and you could say it went far than people thought, but it was very intentionally designed and rapidly advanced and had a lot of human creativity and spontaneity behind it. And I feel like I run into stuff like that all the time, or maybe people who say, or can write beautiful things, but then, you know, they can't grow a potato or, you know, understand certain scientific laws that are helpful sometimes in life, like knowing what the right temperature is for baking food. And then, next thing you know, the fire alarm goes off and they're full of fear because they don't know what to do. But yeah, yeah, people in general seem less well-rounded because we're more and more specialized.

And it's like Marshall McLuhan says about how technologies amputate and extend simultaneously. Like, it's a very weird dichotomy. And I noticed this in just how specialized everything is today. That's why I'm glad that I'm at least trying to study things in a more broad sense. Because there's some pretty big downsides, I think, to this. abandonment of trying to really understand the world through all the very mediums of it. That's all we have time for today. You're listening to Flyover Features on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Emma Marini, and I'm here with Sophia Mans.